The increasing utilization of mobile personal devices, e.g., cell phones, smart phones, etc., has dramatically increased network traffic. For example, fully one billion people worldwide are Internet users with a large portion of this population accessing the Web through their mobile phones. In addition, the behavior of mobile phone customers has changed in recent years. The number of users accessing media-rich data and social networking sites via mobile personal devices has risen dramatically. For example, the average owner of a smart phone today transacts many times the amount of data than did early smart phone users. Consequently, there is a need to continually grow the network capacity to accommodate the ever increasing traffic.
But as is often the case, with great success also comes great challenges. For example, some cellular service providers are struggling to keep up with demand and they may have to place limits on data usage to conserve network bandwidth and spectrum during periods of extremely high usage. This industry pushback is clearly a reaction to the recognition of the bandwidth and capacity limits of existing cellular systems. However, placing limits on data usage is an unpractical approach to reduce demand, which also reduces revenue for the service provider and creates dissatisfaction for customers.